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Today would be our last day in India. Although things were very hectic and the air was not the best in Delhi, I was a little disappointed to be leaving. I will return to India to do more sightseeing in the future.

The morning was filled with me running around trying to organize transportation for everyone to the airport and handing out course evaluations. We also had a visitor from Convergys come and speak to use about relationship management. It was very nice of the speaker to come to MDI because it made it easier for everyone to catch transportation to their destination.

Here are some final parting shots of MDI.

We headed to the airport about 4 hours before our flight because we were warned that it would take a very long time to get through security. In order to get into the airport, we had to show our itinerary to prove that our flight was within the next four hours. We then had to get our bag screened and go through a lengthy interrogation process at the Continental airlines counter. After passing through a line for security, we arrived at the gate about 1 hour before our flight was scheduled to depart. Even though we were starving, we decided against eating at the “Hog Dog”.

While boarding for our flight, we were again asked to open our bags so that personnel could look through them in order to double check that we did not have any liquids or weapons. It was again a lengthy process so our take off time was delayed about an hour.

The trip back to the United States was fairly uneventful except that I was very restless. After arriving in the U.S., we went through customs and then boarded the final leg of our journey to Washington D.C.

The End!

On Monday morning we had a visitor from MDI talk about the financial state of India. I was only in on part of this presentation because I had to help a fellow classmate get to the doctor’s office because he was not feeling too well. The parts of the presentation that I heard sounded interesting.

Here are some more pictures of MDI’s campus grounds.

In the afternoon we went to visit a company called Eli Lilly, which is a global pharmaceutical company. They talked about how they had to compete against larger pharmaceutical companies such as Pfizer by targeting the middle class people in India. Because of the sheer number of people in India, a drug that is cheap will still make a lot of money.

In the evening, we had a cultural event that was sponsored by MDI. A dancer came to show us the traditional styles of dancing. The general consensus was that she was not a very good dancer, but was very good at telling us the story behind each of the dances.

After this cultural event, we all piled into the bus and headed to a local country club to have dinner.

At this dinner, two of the students who were graduating from the MBA program stood up to give a speech because this was their last class.

At the conclusion of the dinner, we headed back and went to sleep prepare for our final day.

We woke up pretty early in the morning (7:30am) to go visit the Taj Mahal. Awesome! We ate breakfast and piled on the bus at 8:30am. We hired a tour guide and a bus for the day and the tour guide would prove to be very helpful and knowledgeable. We finally arrived at the Taj at about 9am.

Because of pollution concerns, we had to park over a mile away and take these electric powered cars to the Taj. The other option is to take these horse drawn rickshaws, but we decided that the electric cars were the way to go.

The gate that surrounds the Taj is also pretty impressive and very large. They screened everyone to make sure that they did not have anything that could be considered dangerous or damaging.

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Day 8 was a Saturday and the beginning of the weekend in which we would trek down to Agra - home of the Taj Mahal. However, before we would begin the six hour bus ride to Agra, we stopped at Apollo Hospitals.

Apollo Hospitals is one of the largest hospital groups in Asia. They are privately owned and cater to both foreign and domestic patients. One of their marketing points it that they are much cheaper than any doctor in the Western countries. The cost for a procedure done there is about 1/5th the cost in the United States, which make it very enticing for those without insurance or those who are looking to get elective procedures completed.

The bus ride took longer than expected (almost 8 hours) because of the numerous breaks that people wanted to take. We finally arrived in Agra at the Taj View. These accommodations were much better than those at MDI and the running hot water was welcoming.

The seventh day I spent visiting Avery Dennison and Cybermedia. Avery Dennison is a very common name in the United States and produces self-adhesive labels. It was interesting how they described the process and how they dealt with the increased pollution when their products need to be very clean. They basically use a ton of air purifiers and their mixture for the paste is a little different than what you would see here in the United States. Unfortunately, we were not allowed to take any pictures.

Cybermedia is a publication company based in India. They talked about how publication differs in India and the United States.

After visiting the two companies we went to a mall. Apparently Delhi has a lot of very good malls and that is part of its attraction.